What did you mean by “what alternatives are there when not using the Application Server Role?”? Please provide details.
By the way, you can check the following guides.
Building a Failover Cluster with Server Core Part 1
Building a Failover Cluster with Server Core Part 2
Building a Failover Cluster with Server Core Part 3
- Server core only having below mentioned server roles only.
· Active Directory Certificate Services
- Active Directory Domain Services
- Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
- DHCP Server
- DNS Server
- File Services (including File Server Resource Manager)
- Streaming Media Services
- Print and Document Services
- Web Server (including a subset of ASP.NET)